...and only one more week until Becoming Jane!

The release of Laurent Tirard's Molière, in close proximity to the U.S. arrival of Christophe Honore's Dans Paris, should provide further proof that the inexplicably in-demand Romain Duris is one of the most smug, unresourceful, unsurprising, and thoroughly infuriating actors to emerge in recent memory. Dans Paris is one brand of prestigiously awful screen acting: precious, grandiose brooding, with attendant beard and dark-rimmed eyes to give the proper impression of seriousness. Molière. a flouncy 17th-century costume comedy, would seem on the surface more properly suited to Duris's showy, sharply accented performance style—he gets to don a flowing musketeer mane and moustache, and wryly dissemble his way through a bevy of ostensibly comic misunderstandings. But comic or dramatic, crestfallen or roguish, he's a fussy, preening screen presence who wheedles and ingratiates himself to the camera wherever the tiniest fillip of a gesture might suffice.

The film fits into the speculative biographical fiction genre—a la Shakespeare in Love, as virtually no critic has failed to observe—taking place within a gray area in Molière's actual biography, imagining the 22-year-old playwright's misadventures while running amok in 1640s Paris. Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of Molière.